Resist influence: Think twice being adopting the HUL influencer playbook for online market outreach

In a world where entire industries sometimes change direction through choreography rather than conviction, that’s an evocative figure.

Indian marketing has always had a weakness for the large gesture. When a major FMCG company moves, others often do not study the move so much as receive it like scripture. Some of this is rational. Companies of that scale have data, muscle and consumer intimacy that few can match. But some of it is plain mimicry.

Economists call one version of this an informational cascade: rational actors suspend private judgement and follow visible behaviour until imitation starts masquerading as consensus. It looks like strategy. Often, it is just organized deference made to look thoughtful by PowerPoint.

While 300,000 online content creators who can hawk products may make sense for a company with over 50 brands and proprietary AI systems for network management, we ought to ask if this model is replicable by others. History is littered with strategies that looked inevitable but proved expensive.

Consider India’s ‘influencer economy.’ Estimates by GroupM, Dentsu and Statista place it at ₹9,000–10,500 crore. Millions of creators have got into the act of shaping purchase decisions. What began as a experiment has become de rigueur. And yet much of it still runs with cheerful informality. Deal pricing is opaque, disclosures are patchy and fraud is endemic.

George Akerlof had a phrase for markets where quality is hard to observe: lemons. Bad deals drive out good ones as price levels favour the former over the latter. The analogy feels uncomfortably contemporary.

Audits by HypeAuditor and a study cited by the World Federation of Advertisers suggest inauthentic engagement affects over 40% of creator accounts globally. When follower counts can be bought, engagement simulated and amplification manufactured, the market begins to reward the appearance of influence over influence itself. Ad campaigns in such systems tend to fail quietly.

Oddly, few question this model, which rests on a peculiar asymmetry: we trust people more than we trust institutions. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer and data from Influencer Marketing Hub show that creator recommendations often command far greater trust than branded communication, especially among younger audiences. Findings like this have tilted marketers in favour of influencers.

Trust, however, is susceptible to arbitrage and arbitraged trust has a way of collapsing. When advertising is cloaked in friendship and endorsement cosplays as authenticity, something subtle begins to come apart.

A channel built on authenticity can industrialize performance, no doubt. Jean Baudrillard, who argued that modern life goes by simulation rather than authentic action, would have smiled darkly. The influencer’s job is to play-act a recommendation. And often the audience knowingly participates in this theatre.

That is not influence but semiotics with a rate card. Yet, strangely, just when the stakes rise, the conversation thins. Marketing professionals speak of online reach, overlooking a problem of control.

A 2024 Advertising Standards Council of India audit found 69% of leading digital influencers in breach of disclosure norms. That should have caused more intellectual discomfort than it did.

Who verifies audiences? Who monitors creator risk after a campaign goes live? Who prices reputational risk exposure? Who writes contracts assuming things may go wrong? These questions need to be raised by marketers.

Friedrich Hayek saw markets as distillers of dispersed information into prices. The problem here is that deal prices do not always go by reliable information.

Measurement cannot always come to the rescue. The attribution of sales to influencer efforts and returns on investment in influencer networks remain among the unresolved problems of this model, as studies put out by Nielsen and McKinsey continue to suggest.

The answer may not be to enlarge networks in the hope that the law of large numbers will kick in, as more influencers could end up scaling up the structural problems outlined above. Which is why the winners in this space may not be those most intoxicated by network expansion, but those ready to get their foundation right: measurement discipline, contractual rigour, authenticity audits, disclosure governance and brand-creator fit.

Systems must precede spectacle. Scale in itself is not strategy, though it acts as an amplifier. If the system beneath it is sound, scale compounds returns. If it is weak, scale industrializes inefficiency. That is true of supply chains, institutions and influence.

Confronted with PowerPoint slides that show HUL’s online outreach, marketing professionals may be tempted to ask how they can do what this FMCG major is doing.

The better question to ask is whether one’s company has what it takes to make a success of it. Blind imitation often looks intelligent at the beginning, but its costs usually reveal themselves later. And in this field, as in other markets, borrowed conviction is often the most expensive asset of all.

The author is a senior advisory professional.